This invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to displaying information about users of a social networking system.
Social networking systems capture large volumes of information from various sources. Information stored by the social networking system will often, if not always, have a time associated with it. Typically, information about a user of a social networking system is displayed through a profile web page that is divided into sections, each section containing different types of information pertaining to the user. For example, a user's profile page may have separate sections for educational information, interests, status updates, and hobbies, as well as a section containing thumbnails of photos of the user, and links to the user's friends.
The shortcoming of this sort of display is that as the social networking system accumulates more and more information about the user over time, it becomes difficult to locate older information about the user, since the user's profile page has a limited amount of display space, and the system is constantly obtaining new information as the user adds new photos, friends, status updates, etc. Although viewers of a user's profile page are often interested in the newest information about a user, this will not always be the case. For example, old classmates of a user may wish to browse information about the user from a shared time together at university that occurred many years earlier.